About More than a refresh: Conversations with the most interesting people you've never met
More than a Refresh is a new podcast dedicated to learning about data and the people behind it through lively conversation, diverse topics, and engaging guest speakers. We explore professional trends within the ecosystem including trouble spots, privacy, equity, democratization, and future directions. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
MTAR T3D Sessions: Understanding PostgreSQL Query Plans and Testing Real Workloads.
EXPLAIN shows the query plan, but understanding why PostgreSQL chose it can take more digging. Testing how a database will behave under a real workload brings its own challenges, especially when a benchmark doesn’t reflect the application you support.
In this Postgres Wishlist episode, Hunter O’Brien, Junior Systems Administrator and Junior DBA at Command Prompt, joins JD to talk through the tools he wishes were easier to use. His experience adapting pgbench tests leads to a conversation about reproducing application workloads and the complications of using production data in a test environment. On query plans, he wants clearer EXPLAIN documentation and more insight into the planner’s decisions.
Hunter also wants a quick way to generate an entity relationship diagram (ERD) when working with unfamiliar schemas, particularly when the best documentation is a busy senior developer. Some of these needs have existing tools or workarounds; the challenge is making them practical for everyday database work.
15 Oct 2026
MTAR T3D Sessions | When Postgres Is Enough | Replacing Valkey with PostgreSQL (Part 2)
In Part 2 of "When Postgres Is Enough", Michael Cooper and JD examine what it took for AgLedger to trust PostgreSQL with work previously split between PostgreSQL and Valkey.
Supporting two databases meant maintaining separate schemas, backups, restores, and state that had to stay coordinated. PostgreSQL did not need to outperform Valkey at every task. It only needed to handle AgLedger’s workload well enough to make the second system unnecessary.
Michael explains how pg-boss allowed him to move queue and rate-limiting work into PostgreSQL, and why managing connections became a more important constraint than memory. He also describes a three-hour test that subjected the system to multiple AI agents, interruptions, mutations, and adversarial attacks. PostgreSQL continued handling the workload without issue.
The conversation also covers RDS IOPS, long-running snapshots, database bloat, and vacuum behavior. Once Michael trusted PostgreSQL as more than a place to store data, he began moving more schema and record structure out of application code and into the database, reducing recompilation work and making customer deployments more flexible.
This episode explores the point where PostgreSQL stops being only the database and becomes the system coordinating the application around it.
James Nelson’s Postgres Love Letter comes down to reliability: being able to depend on the database as the software around it changes.
In this T3D Session, James, Founder and CTO of PgCache, joins JD to explore the benefits and frustrations of PostgreSQL’s conservative approach to development. Protecting existing behavior matters to the people running applications, but so does fixing limitations they encounter in production. JD recalls earlier struggles over timestamp behavior, while James considers how forks give developers room to experiment with changes that could eventually inform core PostgreSQL.
The conversation also looks at pluggable storage and the practical needs behind new extensions. James closes with the problem that led him to build PgCache: serving files at the edge while authorization requests still had to travel back to a central database.
Who has been a guest on More than a refresh: Conversations with the most interesting people you've never met
Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.
Lev Kokotov
Brian
Reza Rassool
James Nelson
Michael Cooper
Reach and audience
Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.
Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
7 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
1 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 55 / 100
A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.
Quality
82
Social presence
0
YouTube
0
Engagement
68
Contact More than a refresh: Conversations with the most interesting people you've never met
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Books guests
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Questions about More than a refresh: Conversations with the most interesting people you've never met
Who hosts More than a refresh: Conversations with the most interesting people you've never met?
JD host the show. Published by Joshua Drake.
How often do new episodes come out?
The show publishes weekly, based on its RSS feed.
Does More than a refresh: Conversations with the most interesting people you've never met take guests?
Yes. Guests have been identified in episode analyses.
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